A Great Jewish Leader
Louis Marshall: Champion Of Liberty. Selected Papers and Addresses.
by Charles Reznikoff.
Jewish Publication Society. 2 Vols. 1196 pp. $10.00.
It is one hundred and one years since Louis Marshall—one of the founders of the American Jewish Committee and its president from 1912 to 1929—was born and almost thirty years since he died, and a new generation that knows him not has grown up; but these two volumes of Marshall’s selected letters, memoranda, briefs, and addresses—competently edited, attractively published, and ably introduced (by Oscar Handlin)—remove any excuse for future ignorance. The size of the volumes is, admittedly, formidable—the work is almost as long as War and Peace; yet the lasting importance of Marshall’s accomplishments amply warrants the time it takes to read the six hundred thousand words.
One reason for our engaging interest is that Marshall is not “dated”; the problems he faced are, by and large, the same ones we face. The scenes have changed but the characters and the plot seem to persist. Another reason is that the hero of this work was a man of principle: one only rarely sees him acting impulsively, petulantly, or on a small scale. His antagonists were men or issues or movements that challenged his highest and deepest resources, and he responded to them with great intelligence and skill and out of deeply rooted convictions. Time and again one feels that here was a whole man acting and reacting.
And the stage for his action was large—national policies, international conflicts, catholic Jewry; almost as large as the world itself. While we know that Marshall had an intensive family life and that he enjoyed an extremely lucrative law practice, his absorption was in grave and great public issues, and we see almost nothing of the man’s “petty pace from day to day,” of the walking shadow that “struts and frets his hour upon the stage.” We see only the fast pace of the man, one who seemed always ready to run a race. He was made of the stuff of princes great in state or church.
Louis Marshall was a great Jewish leader. But his leadership, let me hasten to add, was a by-product of his Jewishness: he did not seek to become or to be a leader, but he did seek to be a Jew: he would gladly have renounced his leadership and even have lost his life sooner than to be false to Judaism. It was Judaism that seemed to be his heart and his mind; it was the very center, the essence, of his being, his existence, and his life. Of course Marshall was a great lawyer, one of the greatest constitutional lawyers we have had; and it was as a great lawyer that Samuel Untermyer brought him from Syracuse to his firm in New York when Marshall was thirty-eight years of age. But once he was settled in his new law firm and new home, the lawyer was absorbed by the Jew, and it is apparent as one reads his papers that his best, most eager thought went to the issues that touched him as a Jew.
Marshall was not an abstract thinker, not a philosopher. His thoughts came out of the stress and strain of his actions. There was no comprehensive plan, no intricate analysis; but there was a central loyalty from which thought flowed as tributaries. Marshall’s “secret,” “the general intention” of his work, as Henry James would put it, “the string the pearls were strung on, the buried treasure, the figure in the carpet,” was his Jewishness. This Jewishness expressed itself in numerous ways.
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For one thing, Marshall had a keen sense of what traditionally would be called Klal Yisroel, or the catholicity of Israel. It was basically, with Marshall, not an intellectual conception but a sense that led him to extend a loving embrace to every Jew and everything Jewish. He was probably, with Horace M. Kallen, the most radically pluralistic Jew in our society. It was unqualifiedly true that to Marshall nothing Jewish was alien. And he was willing, and even eager, to accept the multiplicity of Jewish expressions and phenomena on the terms they offered, each with its own character, its own richness of meaning. He did not want them to change, to give up their unique qualities, though he did expect them to constitute an e pluribus unum, a catholic Israel united in such a way that the pluribus, the diversity, remained, was not swallowed up by an engulfing Gleichschaltung that left only the unum.
Thus, Marshall was for many years President of the Reform Temple Emanu-El, and at the same time chairman of the board of the Conservative Jewish Theological Seminary. “A sincere adherent to Orthodox or to Reform Judaism is, in my opinion,” he said, “equally a Jew, and neither has the moral right to disregard the other, nor has either the right to impose his particular views upon the other. . . . So long as both conscientiously carry out their principles, they both promote and advance the cause of religion, or morality, of good citizenship and of Judaism.” He lived, then, by the rule of “Live and let live.”
But he did more than merely let live—he went out of his way to help the other institution, the other point of view, the other culture to survive and live and flourish.
Although head of a temple, he disliked the word for having an element of snobbery about it. The word “synagogue” pleased him better. So, too, though his temple was affiliated with the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, he preferred the word “Jewish.” In part his objection to the more fancy or euphemistic terms was a response to the fact that they tended to suggest a class division between temple Hebrews and synagogue Jews, between German Hebrews and their East European coreligionists. Not for one moment would Marshall concede the legitimacy of any such division. “I do not know what you mean,” he wrote in a letter, “by the better class of Jews. . . . I am myself radical to this extent, that I do not believe in classes. . . . I do not consider myself better than any other Jew. . . .”
Other Jews have, of course, expressed similar ideas, but the greatness of Marshall in part lay in the fact that these were not merely ideas to him; he acted them out. Thus, for example, though Yiddish had not been spoken in his parents’ home, as a mature person he learned to speak and read Yiddish, and he read, and often enjoyed, the Yiddish newspapers. He felt a close kinship with the Jewish immigrants from Russia, Poland, and other East European countries, and he wanted to understand them and their ways of thought and life, and he wanted to communicate with them directly and in their own words. He invested his own money in a Yiddish newspaper, and when a Yiddish newspaper found itself in trouble with the Post Office, he intervened successfully on behalf of the publisher.
This attitude, this respect for the different, also comes out clearly in his relation to Zionism. He said over and over that he was no political Zionist and that he did not expect a Jewish state to be created in Palestine. “I cannot, however,” he wrote, “overlook the fact that there are many high-minded men who believe that the opportunity should be given to the Jews who desire to do so to be enabled to establish their home in Palestine. . . . There is no likelihood that there ever will be a Jewish State in Palestine. There is, however, a strong possibility that, as a result of united action, an outlet may be found in Palestine for the persecuted and suffering Jews of Eastern Europe. There is no other outlet for them. The doors of Western Europe have been closed against them. Our recent immigration law [this was written in 1921] indicates that the opportunities that in the past have been afforded them of establishing themselves in this country are to be taken away from them. Eastern Europe is bankrupt. Where shall they go if they desire to better their condition? What objection can there be, therefore, to an effort to establish for them a home in the land of their fathers and to enable them . . . to build up the waste places of the Holy Land and to bring about a renaissance?” In these and in numerous other passages one sees a basic human love overriding doctrinaire dictates of the mind.
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I shall cite one more instance, in some ways perhaps the most significant of all: his interest in Jewish education.
In 1914, at a time when most Jewish leaders thought of Jewish education only in terms of the Sunday school or the Talmud Torah, Louis Marshall lent his support to Samson Benderly to organize a bureau of Jewish education in New York City, that later became the Jewish Education Committee; and in 1920 he reached the conclusion, as he wrote to Herbert H. Lehman, that the principal need of American Jewry was the spread and strengthening of Jewish education, and he began to plan a national movement toward the achievement of this purpose, that would have an annual budget of millions of dollars. He saw Jewish education as a communal rather than as a personal or congregational or partisan responsibility, and he wanted to rally for it the strongest elements that would work as national forces and that would represent all points of view. He envisioned an organization like the American Association for Jewish Education, which did not in fact come into existence until two decades later.
To stimulate others, he himself set up a fund of $150,000 for the religious education of Jewish girls in New York. In 1920 he wrote that he considered the problem of Jewish education more important than hospitals, orphan asylums, and similar charities. If the Jews did not deal with this problem at once, and with a broad, comprehensive, and generous plan, the consequences would be “calamitous.”
Taking his stance as a Jew, Marshall saw Israel as a rich complex of diversities, and the American nation as a union of differences. He, in each instance, respected and loved the diversities, the differences, the pluralities. He was not afraid of the bigoted charge of divided loyalties: he shouted his multiple loyalties from the housetops, for he knew that at his center was a single, all-encompassing, imminent and yet transcendent value—his loyalty to Judaism.
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